Open Tech 2009
I presented a 15-minute talk on recording radio drama for the Internet over VoIP at the UKUUG’s Open Tech 2009 conference on July 4 in London.
Here’s a brief summary of the presentation. You can watch and listen to the presentation as a Slidecast here.
Radio Drama At A Distance
Radio drama is a wonderful medium: it can be inexpensive to produce, extremely evocative, and of course the pictures are so much better than on television. But effective radio drama does not require the facilities of Broadcasting House: using VOIP techniques and an audio editing system you can create it at home and not even be in the same room — you can be anywhere in the world.
The Radio Riel Players was founded in 2008 by a group of Second Life residents around the world to produce plays for broadcast on internet radio.
So far, we have produced a few public-domain works, including excerpts from Shakespeare for the “Shakespeare in SL” project, an E F Benson short story, and Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol”. Next up is “Pride & Prejudice”.
The technique is an ideal way of allowing a group of people separated by space to create new and traditional dramatic works for Internet distribution.
This talk shows how you can do it yourself.
With performers around the world it requires plenty of planning and co-ordination to get people together at the same time and determine which segments to record when.
There are steps you can take to maximise audio quality (we use Skype) and post-production is needed to remove latency and polish the final result (though you can do live performances at a pinch).
You also need to use public domain or original material, original music and sound effects (or use royalty-free sources or take out a PRS Limited Online Exploitation Licence and use production music/effects).
The result can be broadcast on internet radio or made available as a podcast.
I spoke at the beginning of the first session of Stream B.
—Richard E